CUREs Update and Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day

Tomorrow is my school’s Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day (CSC Day), which is one of my favorite days of the year. We don’t have classes, but rather spend the day on presentations of undergraduate research. It is a lot of fun, and it is a great way to end the year.

I am doing a CURE in two of my classes, and they are doing poster sessions tomorrow. Here is a summary of what I think about both of them.

• My elementary education students are studying a game played on graphs. This has been a sensational success. We have spent about one-third of the semester on it (every Friday for a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class), and they have produced good results. We have five teams presenting posters tomorrow, each with four students. The students enjoyed the experience, I enjoyed the experience, and I think that this created an excitement for math in some of the students that will carry over when they are teachers. Moreover, one of the five teams presented their work at an undergraduate research conference, and they were likely the first elementary education majors every to present at the 45-year old conference.
• My linear algebra students are working on the NIEP. There are two teams presenting tomorrow. I am less certain that this was a success. The students did really well—each team came up with something interesting and developed a skill they wouldn’t have learned otherwise. However, I did not devote as much time to it as I had hoped, since there is a lot to learn in linear algebra. As planned, we spent about one-quarter of the semester’s time on this problem. Still, it didn’t seem to be that much. One issue is that we worked on it for a full class period every other week; perhaps we should have worked on it for half a class period every week.

I am teaching both of these classes next semester again, and I am definitely going to do a variation of what I did for my elementary education students. I am going to ask my linear algebra students what they thought of the CURE next week, although I am leaning toward continuing to do something like it again next year. They really did seem to gain something that they wouldn’t have gotten in class.